The Orchid Shroud (27 page)

The passage made Armand Vigier appear a brute. But it was curiously disjunctive as well, relating, it seemed, to an event from a more distant past. Mara was also puzzled by the implied volume of hymenal blood and the phrase “as was his wont,” which suggested more frequent visitations and easier access than Captain Vigier could have enjoyed. Studying the words more closely, she began to see another interpretation, one which Jean-Claude, as a man, might well have overlooked. “It was my first” and “I thought my stomach had come apart” did not have to refer to the rupturing of a maidenhead. Could this not be Cécile’s account of her first menstruation? In which case, Jean-Claude had wrongly linked it with Cécile’s army captain. Viewed in this light, the passage strongly suggested that the stealthy visitations had begun long before Cécile had gone to Paris and that they had more likely occurred within the precincts of her own home. But who was he who came to her in the night, who “liked it that way” and had promised gentleness, but just the once? One person came to Mara’s mind: Hugo, whom Cécile had accused of “using her brutally.” Had he been subjecting his youngest sister to systematic rape since childhood?

Frowning, Mara rose and walked over to Cécile’s unfortunate portrait. The terrified girl had grown into a dispirited female with a low forehead, her father’s eyes, and an undershot jaw. Her olive-green gown framed an uninteresting décolletage, and her hands, encircling a temperamental-looking brindled pug, were large. The sitter, probably then in her mid-twenties, used to a lifetime of abuse and with little hope of marriage, looked resentfully conscious of her unloveliness and slightly mad.

“You bastard,” she said aloud to Hugo’s painted self, hanging opposite.

Farther down the wall, Xavier drew her with his wolfish glare. She moved to stand squarely before him, glaring back, as if by doing so she was challenging the whole of the unpleasant de Bonfond clan.
“Sang Es Mon Drech.”
The scroll declared its bearer’s self-proclaimed right to blood. A thought struck her. She scanned the bookshelves and eventually found a French-Occitan dictionary. She opened it and ran her finger down the page for the Occitan equivalent of the word
loup-garou
. It was, she learned,
leberon
. She almost laughed aloud at the irony of it. Despite his unpleasant features, Xavier, it seemed, had a sense of humor. As for Baby Blue—she sighed inwardly—if he was Cécile’s bastard, he was not a love child; instead the product of that age-old, sordid family pastime, incest.

Mara suddenly had no desire to read the remaining pages of the 1870 folder. The library with its handsome architectural features felt somehow oppressive and slightly menacing, as if the book-lined walls and hanging portraits had slyly closed in on her as she sat in her lonely pool of light. The rest of the space about her was in shadow. To her left, the doorway leading into the grand salon gaped black and uninviting.

It was then that she heard it—a distant wail that reverberated through the house like a cat in an echo chamber. With a low growl, Jazz lumbered to his feet, hackles rising. Mara rose, too, gripping the edge of the table. She strained her ears to trace the source of the cry. Perhaps it had not come from the house after all but from outside. A night bird, she told herself, and realized that she had been holding her breath. The unexpected proximity of the next sound nearly caused her to scream. It was soft, like a drawn-out sigh, coming from the darkness of the adjoining salon. Slowly, Mara turned terrified eyes to the doorway.

“Thérèse?” she croaked. Had the housekeeper returned unexpectedly?

A sharp crack from another direction caused her to wheel
about. The exterior door of the library flew open. A dark, narrow object wavered about in the opening. It took Mara a second to recognize it for what it was, and the threat it represented. With a scream, she threw herself down behind the table.

“For god’s sake, Didier, don’t shoot!”

Y
ou oughtn’t to be here,” the gardener shrilled, every bit as frightened as she. “He’s gone. She’s off to her sister’s. I see a light. Babette here doesn’t take kindly to strangers in the house.” He waved his shotgun, and again Mara ducked.

“I’m sorry, Didier. I should have told you. But I’m not a stranger. You know me.”

“Babette doesn’t,” the old man insisted. “And she doesn’t like dogs.” During this interchange, Jazz, who was not an attack dog despite his pit-bull ancestry, had approached and was nosing the old man’s knee tentatively.

“What do you think you’re doing here anyway, in the middle of the night?” Didier’s tone was still aggrieved, but he pushed Jazz away with the muzzle of the shotgun before lowering it to the floor. Mara breathed more easily and stood up.

“I’m looking for information on the de Bonfonds,” she told him honestly. “Anything that will help clear up Jean-Claude Fournier’s murder.”

“Him!” The gardener scowled and stepped fully into the room, pulling the door shut behind him since it was raining outside. His jacket was spotted with water. “Always poking his nose where it didn’t belong. Asking questions.”

“Questions? What kind of questions?”

“Daft things about the family, such as was no business of his. Nor yours, either. Now, if I was you, I’d go home and leave well enough alone. And take this animal with you.” Babette’s steely snout came up again.

“All right.” Mara needed no further urging to put away Cécile’s
diary and gather up her things. But she made a mental note: one way or another, she was coming back to find out what it was Jean-Claude had been after.

Didier marched her at gunpoint through the salon, innocent of specters now that the light had been turned on. Had she really heard something in there? As he ushered her out the front door, she said: “Didier, I heard a noise just a little while ago. A kind of wailing. Did you hear it?”

Up close she could see stubble on his chin and the milky circles around his irises, smell his odor, an old man’s whiff of stale urine.

“Wailing?” he said, giving the word a full measure of contempt. “No wailing around here. Unless it was done by that hound of yours.”

THURSDAY AFTERNOON, 13 MAY

L
e Coquelicot was a ramshackle eatery situated in the humble delta of the Rauze, a minor tributary of the Dordogne. It sold ice creams, drinks, and
frites
, served at little tables set out on a silty beach under the trees. Mara arrived at a little past four. Julian was waiting for her, a canoe, which he had rented from the concession there, already loaded in his van. She left her car in
le parking
and climbed in beside him. They would drive to some point on the main valley road, put the canoe in the water, and paddle downstream. That much she knew.

What she had not realized was that the Rauze drained the Sigoulane Valley, running north-south along the western foot of Aurillac Ridge. Normally a shallow stream sliding sluggishly in a wide bed, it was in full spate at the moment from the recent heavy rains. Julian drove until he found a spot at the north end of the valley where the road came close enough to the stream to let them put directly into the water.

“I wish you’d tell me what this is all about,” said Mara as they carried the canoe between them to the bank.

“You’ll see.”

“But why do we have to go by boat?”

“Because according to Didier, where I want to take you is inaccessible by foot right now.”

“Well, at least explain how he comes into it.”

“He was the one who told me about it. He’s full of odd bits of information, is old Didier.”

They pushed off, Julian paddling stern, Mara in the bow. Wisely, they had left the dogs at home. Jazz had never been in a canoe, and Bismuth, according to Julian, would probably try to dig his way out through the bottom.

“Are you supposed to do it like that?” Mara called over her shoulder, referring to something Julian called a J-stroke. She, rummaging deep in her Canadian Girl Guide past, was not so sure.

“Do it like what?”

“Well, flick your oar out of the water quite so hard.”

“It’s called finishing the stroke.” The aluminum craft bonged hollowly each time his paddle struck the side. “The rental fellow showed me how. It’s what keeps us going straight.”

“We’re wobbling.”

“We’re not. We’re dead on course.”

“Then how come we point left one minute and right the next?”

“You must be overpulling.”

“I’m not.”

“Look,” said Julian in exasperation, because they were in fact zigzagging, “both of us have to work as an efficient, well-coordinated team.”

After that they paddled silently, if somewhat jerkily. Eventually, they realized that the current was strong enough to let them drift at a leisurely pace downstream without any paddling at all.

I
think it must be around here,” Julian said, gazing up at the ridge towering above them, as if looking for markers. “In fact, that may be the spot we’re looking for, just up ahead.” The canoe slid slowly beneath a great, overhanging cliff.

They beached on a narrow strip of shingle that in a drier season would have been a wide, stony shore. Julian jumped out and began exploring the base of the cliff, wading heedlessly in water up to his knees. He quickly found the opening of a cave, partly obscured by overhanging bushes.

“I’m afraid it’s a bit wet,” he said. “The stream’s riding a lot higher than normal. Hope you don’t mind.”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Er—no.”

In fact, they had to walk through water for only the first few meters of the cave. The floor of it sloped upward, and they were soon standing dry in a dim, circular rock chamber. The air had a heavy, unpleasant smell.

“Julian, why are we here? Are there bats in this cave?”

“According to Didier, this place is called the Wolf Cave because it’s where, legend has it,
loups-garous
used to gather when the moon was full. Given you’re so into werewolves, I thought you’d be interested in seeing it.” He had a flashlight and was sweeping the beam of it across the cave walls.

“I am,” she conceded. She looked up. The cave roof seemed to shift. Bats.

“Aha,” he said. “Follow me. The thing I really wanted to check out”—he disappeared suddenly, leaving her in semidarkness with nothing but the echo of his voice—“is this tunnel, which apparently runs straight under Aurillac Ridge and directly up into the cellar of Aurillac Manor.”

“It does what?” Mara hurried after him, slipping sideways through a narrow opening in the rock. The tunnel, picked out by Julian’s flashlight, ran blackly before her, piercing solid limestone.

“That’s right. As best as I can make out, it’s at least a kilometer and a half long.” The flashlight bounced off sloping walls that gleamed with moisture. “During the Occupation, it was a hideout for Resistance fighters. But originally it must have been constructed for some other purpose.”

“I think you’re right,” Mara affirmed, and told Julian of Aurillac’s Huguenot origins. “The Bonfonds, as they were called then, must have built it as an escape route. The Wars of Religion during the sixteenth century were pretty bloody, and Protestants generally
got the worst of it.” She also told him Jean-Claude’s tale of the man bathing in the river who transformed into a wolf, and described Xavier’s supernatural ability to disappear at will and reappear in other places.

“I wonder if this was how he moved about,” she speculated, staying on Julian’s heels to keep close to the source of light. She did not like the darkness and the way the tunnel walls leaned in on her. “If someone saw him and that dog of his outside this cave on a moonlit night, you can understand how the idea of a man transforming into a werewolf might have taken hold.”

After another minute she said, “Julian, you don’t suppose Christophe used this tunnel as well?”

“D’you mean when he disappeared? Not likely. His car’s gone. I think he just walked out of the house and drove away. Anyway, if he had, you saw for yourself he’d have needed a boat.” Fifty meters farther along he said, “Besides, he couldn’t have got past this.”

Mara peered over his shoulder. The flashlight illuminated a rock fall. The way was entirely choked off by a wall of debris.

T
hey were shoving off into the stream again when Julian stood up suddenly. The canoe rocked dangerously. Mara gave a small shriek and grabbed both gunnels. Her paddle slid away. She made a lunge for it, causing them to dip even more precariously.

“You made me drop my paddle,” she yelled, as she leaned out to retrieve it from the water. “Are you trying to sink us?”